If you want to learn about your neighborhood’s poverty rates or household size, don’t worry – you don’t need to be a math whiz. You can find all that information and more on the Data You Can Use website. 

Rohan Katti, data systems program manager, and Amanda Beavin, community data and research program manager, explained how to find and use the organization’s most recent Milwaukee neighborhood data reports. 

Data You Can Use has been making data accessible and useful in improving community conditions for over nine years, but the staff continues to improve the process. 

“It's really just based on us asking, and also people just approaching us and saying: ‘We love your tools, but we really want to know this specific thing. Can you help us with that?’ " Beavin said. 

What is new? 

Every year, Data You Can Use updates its neighborhood portraits, neighborhood change-over-time reports, MKE Indicators and a neighborhood dashboard.

The neighborhood portraits are individual reports of 27 neighborhoods that include 16 tables of data about population or household characteristics. Some of the main details from these reports are visualized in graphs and charts in the neighborhood dashboard. 

New neighborhood portraits were added last year, including Borchert Field, Historic Mitchell Street, Mitchell West, Nash Park, Walker’s Point and Silver Spring. 

The MKE Indicators uses the categories of equitable housing, population, market value, equity and access and health to look at well-being on a citywide and neighborhood level. 

“Both the neighborhood portraits and the MKE Indicators are very much focused on people,” Beavin said. “Focusing on the physical environment and climate is something we haven't done a lot of, but we're starting to do more with because we're getting more requests from the community to have that kind of data available.” 

Data You Can Use updated the neighborhood portraits this spring with the most recent data available from the U.S. Census Bureau, which is the 2019-2023 American Community Survey five-year estimates. 

The MKE Indicators includes data from this survey but also incorporates other datasets that are not all from the same year, like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's PLACES 2022 data.

Last year, at the request of community members and partners, the team created change-over-time reports that examine data over 10 years for each neighborhood. 
“It's something we put a lot of thought into,” Katti said. “People requested this for a while, but we had to make sure we did it right before we actually did it.” 

Why is this data important? 

Census data is divided into geographical areas called census tracts. It can be broken down by congressional or state legislative district or ZIP code.

But if you want to compare neighborhoods, you have to do some calculations, Katti said. 

Data You Can Use has a team to analyze the data and work with community groups and organizations to determine neighborhood boundaries and which parts of the data are useful. 

By presenting the data in multiple ways, it makes it more accessible to people with different learning styles, interests and scales. 

“You can find different avenues to look at different things because they all are trying to help tell the singular story of the neighborhood,” Katti said. 

How can community groups use the data?

Residents or groups can use the data to learn about their neighborhood’s overall composition or look at specific problems or strengths, which can be used in applying for grants or communicating local needs. 

How to read and interpret the data 

Every data product contains some instructions at the beginning and background information on the data sources, including how to approach margins of error.

In the reports, some tables also have “How to interpret this table” and “Key Takeaways” sections, which give further context and examples. 

The change-over-time reports use color coding to highlight statistically significant changes. 

“So we try our best to make it as accessible as possible, using layman’s terms and explaining the process thoroughly, using visual cues to help people draw their eyes to the right places,” Katti said. 

How to get in contact

Reach out to the Data You Can Use team at connectwithus@datayoucanuse.org or ask a data question here.

The group also recently released a report on Latine youth achievement and has more maps and reports available on its website. 

Staff occasionally host data chats and demos and love to get feedback on how the data is being used and what could be improved. 

Meredith Melland is the neighborhoods reporter for the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service and a corps member of Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues and communities. Report for America plays no role in editorial decisions in the NNS newsroom.

This article first appeared on Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.